At 6:03 PM +0530 3/20/08, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote:
>I lurk on naturerecordists-L because I hope to record birds someday. I
>have been slowly assimilating equipment recommendations and recording
>techniques (in theory) over the past year, to say nothing of enjoying
>the recordings other people have posted.
>
>In the meantime, I use the stereo head-mounted microphones I was born
>with, and store the recordings in slow, unreliable biological memory.
>
>A friend and I went up to the Kumaon Himalayas in mid-February, with a
>new tent and five days of vacation time. We camped for two nights near
>Vinayak looking for Cheer Pheasants (Catreus wallichii; heard many, saw
>none), then drove to the Sat Tal ("Seven Lakes") area. We tried to pitch
>the tent there, but a sudden violent hailstorm intervened, and we spent
>the night drying our gear in front of a room heater in a hotel.
>
>This post is about the next night, our last in Sat Tal before we headed
>back to Delhi the next day. My friend ate something that disagreed with
>him, and felt unwell enough to return to the hotel. I had found a nice
>camp site while hiking during the day, but the evening brought rapidly
>fading light and ominous thunder from just over the hill.
>
>What to do?
>
>I pitched the tent in a clearing in the forest beside Panna Tal. It was
>almost dark when I got the fly sheet securely staked down, and I still
>hadn't convinced myself that this was a good idea. That afternoon, the
>Pradhan (head) of Mehragaon (a nearby village) had treated me to a rant
>about increasing crime rates in the area and, as an afterthought, told
>me a story about a Leopard having snatched a dog from his house a few
>nights before; and there I was, alone in the forest, a couple of
>kilometres from the nearest human habitation.
>
>I got in, and zipped the tent door shut.
>
>Fifteen minutes later, I was in my sleeping bag, watching light from the
>moonrise filter in through the roof of the tent. I was lying in a large
>clearing at the foot of a hill, between the road to Sat Tal (some fifty
>metres behind me) and Panna Tal (barely twenty metres from my feet). The
>road ran flat and straight for a few hundred metres along the forest's
>edge, but otherwise wound its way up the hillside to Mehragaon (to my
>left) or, in the other direction, downhill to Sat Tal.
>
>The first thing I noticed was the stereo field: I could hear cars coming
>downhill, starting all the way at the top, far to my left, slowly moving
>closer to my head and then, as the road curved back, moving to the left
>again, but not as far away as before. Three loops, getting closer each
>time; accelerating on the short straight stretch, and shooting past my
>head and into the right side of my "view", then receding slowly.
>
>(Lying there in the dark, straining my ears to hear footsteps or wild
>animals, I learned a valuable lesson about handling noise: every time
>I thought I heard something moving around outside the tent, it turned
>out to be my trousers rubbing against the sleeping bag, or the zipper
>of the bag clicking, or something similarly innocuous (wait, is that
>handling noise or self noise? :-). But I relaxed, took deep breaths,
>and was eventually able to lie quite still and focus on sounds that
>really originated outside the tent.)
>
>As night fell, the traffic slowly ceased. It didn't feel like it was
>going to rain (despite the earlier thunder), and there wasn't much of
>a wind either. In the comparative silence, I slowly began to be aware
>of more and more hitherto unnoticed sounds.
>
>The forest around me was filled with the sounds of twigs snapping and
>leaves settling. An occasional gust of wind would touch the clearing,
>making the fly sheet rattle, blowing a few leaves around, making the
>trees whisper. If I strained my hearing, I fancied I could hear the
>lake's edge lapping at some stone steps on the bank. I heard some thin,
>Minivet-like whistles, but they stopped quickly, and were not repeated.
>I could hear small animals (squirrels?) moving about in the forest and
>scampering away after being frightened by something I couldn't hear. A
>few times, I heard something scrabbling and scratching in the leaf
>litter on the hillside (Pheasants? But at night?).
>
>Some distant Red-Wattled Lapwings (Vanellus indicus) -- unexpected, but
>unmistakable, with their panicked "Did heee do it?" calls -- took alarm
>at something and took off in their wheeling flight, as they tend to do
>at the slightest excuse. A flock of Slaty-Headed Parakeets (Psittacula
>himalayana), disturbed in their sleep, called a few times to make sure
>everything was all right (toooi?), and then settled down again.
>
>Suddenly, very close by, I heard a flock of Geese in flight, with their
>loud, haunting, discordant cacophony of honking drowning out everything
>else. I hadn't expected to encounter any Geese in the mountains, and I
>was comforted by the familiarity of the sound. I heard the flock start
>down the hill and fly over my camp site, and land in the lake with an
>occasional honk and many quiet splashes.
>
>Not far away, a Mountain Scops Owls (Otus spilocephalus) started up its
>measured, monotonous "pink pink" call, a sound that was repeated through
>the night by different individuals, sometimes without pause for half an
>hour or more. I'd spotted an Asian Barred Owlet (Glaucidium cuculoides)
>sitting in a bare tree while looking for a camp site; and now and then,
>one of them would pipe up with a quavering "oop-op-op-op-op", then fall
>silent again. I also heard a deep Bubo-like "hoo-hoo" call a few times,
>but I don't know what it was.
>
>Another intriguing call that I could not identify was an accelerating
>series of "hoo"s, starting with widely spaced notes and ending with a
>Dove-like crooning rattle: "Hoo [pause] hoo [shorter pause] hoo [short
>pause] ho... ho-ho-h-h-h" (Imagine dropping a marble on the floor from
>a height. This call fit that pattern in its execution). There seemed to
>be only one individual, and it repeated this call several times, with
>pauses, at around 2200, but much less frequently later at night.
>
>One sound that featured in my recording only by its absence, thankfully,
>was the rasping cough of a Leopard. I've never heard one before, but by
>all accounts, I would have been able to recognise it... I certainly was
>paying attention! But if a Leopard came to drink at the lake that night
>(as I'd been told they often do), it arrived and departed in silence.
>
>But there were plenty of sounds to keep me guessing. I could hear grunts
>and sighs from the forest, Langurs coughing, an occasional Barking Deer
>breaking the silence with its sharp bark, and being answered somewhere
>up the hill. Twigs kept snapping as things moved about in the shrubbery.
>There was a pained, long-drawn-out groaning noise ending in a quiet sigh
>(which I hoped was only a frog!). Branches creaked as they settled into
>their sleep, and I heard the occasional mouse-like chittering (but could
>only imagine the interested Owls nearby). As night wore on, I also heard
>what sounded like grass being quietly munched irregularly somewhere in
>the clearing.
>
>At some point, I drifted off to sleep.
>
>I woke up before dawn, and was surprised to realise that I'd slept very
>well. Over the past few days, I had grown used to waking early, to the
>loud, harsh "Kok-KOK-kok-kok" calls of the Koklass Pheasant (Pucrasia
>macrolopha), but it was eerily quiet in comparison. There was no wind,
>no creaking trees, no insects, not even distant bird calls, nothing.
>
>As I stuck my head out of the tent, a started Barking Deer bounded away
>from the clearing, and in the silence, I set to taking the tent apart.
>
>-- ams
>
Terrific, concluding metaphor!
I enjoyed reading your night-long recording, Abhijit. I especially
enjoyed how you portrayed your underlying fears being moderated by
awe and the temporal "map" you created from the layered events. Of
course, the forest at night has a very rich legacy in human
story-telling. Its wonderful to be reminded of this history, mystery
and biology.
Whenever you cite a species I have not heard, its impossible for me
to not hear something-- I just pull a sound from the pool of those I
have heard. Shows how important attentiveness and recording is as
consciousness always fills-in the blanks. Rob D.
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